We Need Our Own Macklemore

Macklemore’s pro-same-sex-marriage rap video is “quite masterful, actually . . . ” says R. J. Snell in today’s column , “beautifully produced, skillfully managed, and positioned within a moving narrative of birth, death, and love; it is, I suspect, devastatingly effective in using sentiment to shape judgment.” The problem?

50 million views of “Same Love” and roughly 10 million “Modern Family”  viewers  a week on the one side, and absolutely  nothing  of a similar mode of discourse on the other side. Nothing—that’s my point.

We can’t abandon the intellectual task of argument and research, or the political task of law and public policy, or education. All these are necessary and worth doing, but we also need the collaboration and help of artists, musicians, cinematographers, and poets, partly to show the beauty of conjugal marriage, but also, and perhaps more so, to tell the bigger story of the Church’s mission for dignity. So long as holy water means poison and  Humanae Vitae  is linked to burning crosses, our arguments will be received as abstract and inhumane moralism rather than the civilization of love they express in their own, faltering way.

Read the full column here .